


siren from a distant shore

by Azzandra



Series: Traverse [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 02:39:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a whirlwind pale romance, unbelievable even by Troll Hollywood standards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	siren from a distant shore

It was only a quaint little rumor at first, a throwaway comment while waiting for drinks ( _hey, did you hear there's a human...?_ ) and quickly forgotten when the drinks arrived. At most it would get mentioned again as a tongue-in-cheek poke at someone for being less than truthful ( _yeah, that sounds about as real as that human we've been hearing about_ ) or at most as an overly earnest-sounding insistence ( _but there is! There is a human, my matesprit's friend's kismesis saw her!_ )

So yes, Tavros did hear there was a human. Several times. It was a curiosity, but sometimes they'd have aliens passing through.

It happened a few times a sweep. They rarely remained, though. Too many Alternian military types in one place tended to make most other species nervous, non-aggression pact or no, and the dull town extending between the spaceport and the military base like an unsightly oil slick was little more than a pit stop for many. A cold block to sleep in, a lukewarm meal washed down with sub par alcohol, and then off to more interesting places. Off to more interesting lives. The few permanent residents of the town were a handful of trolls and a greater number of various alien species, almost all criminals or exiles or extremely shady types, and certainly not one human among them.

It was not the first time the conscripts cobbled together a fantasy to help them dream through their dreary life on the fringes of Alternian space. What would a human even be doing this far out, when the border with human-controlled space was nearly at the opposite end of the Empire? It made no sense.

There was nothing but the boring, repetitive grind of drills and duty shifts. There was the occasional reprieve of a new movie, a new gamegrub making the rounds through the base. There were drinks out once a week, with the same handful of faces you saw every night, and the same tired rumors and the same old complaints. 'We used to be a force to be reckoned with' and 'there was never a dull moment under the old Empress' and 'god, it's so boring, everything's boring, so, so boring'. Always that last one, more than the others.

So what did dreams and rumors hurt? If his comrades wanted to believe that there was a human passing through, that they would get to see a human in real live flesh, Tavros was not going to argue. Even if he did not believe it himself.

Which, truth be told, he kind of didn't. It wasn't the most bizarre rumor he'd ever heard while stationed on this planet, and just the other day, he'd accidentally walked in on two of fellow cavalreapers piled together in a corner of the base, aggressively rubbing each other's face ('oh yeah, pap me like that, fuck, yes, more, more') and he'd been quietly mortified, but he managed to walk out the door again without alerting them to his presence. It wasn't usually something possible, even when he was at his stealthiest, on account of his horns, but he was highly motivated and they were deeply absorbed in each other. Their gasps and mumbles followed him all the way down the hall ('yes, fuck, just like a human, you filthy paleslut', Tavros heard, and shuddered at the mental scars the experience was inflicting on him).

It was the kind of rumor that he thought likely to have sprung up on its own, given the right environment, and the right environment was certainly this one, in his opinion. Like fungus in wet climate or mold on yeast-based nutritional loaves, rumors of humans seemed highly likely in a base full of restless soldiers who fancied themselves warriors without having seen a day of combat, and especially when such soldiers had no better thing to do than watch the same three movies over and over again, one of which contained a lurid and borderline pornographic pale interspecies romance between a blueblood ruffiannihilator still grieving for her lost moirail and a human doctortionist prone to excessive crying. This movie in particular caused a lot of whispering and glassy-eyed sighing, and probably a lot of fantasizing as well. The sudden influx of human characters in Alternian cinematography probably had less to do with cultural exchange and more to do with how easy humans were in the pale quadrant.

Tavros, for one, did not hold out any hope for the possibility of seeing any human in person in the immediate future, and he thought that was quite mature of him, even if he sometimes indulged in daydreams about soft, clawless hands gently papping his face. He could admit to himself that yes, humans were quite pitiable in a very, very pale kind of way, but he was well aware that it was a fantasy, and having little fantasies is okay and perfectly natural.

All in all, it was a perfectly reasonable position to take, and Tavros would have kept to it, if not for one small hitch: there really was a human on the planet.

*

And it wasn't as if Tavros went looking for her, or anything. The whole thing was abrupt and a little bit unsettling.

It was late in the night, nearer to morning, and he was ambling back to base after the weekly drinks got too intense for his taste. He wasn't drunk—he wasn't much for alcohol, truth be told—and he was taking a shortcut through the back alleys. It wasn't the kind of route you took if you were concerned with your safety, but even though he was lowblood, he grew up massive, almost as wide as he was tall, and he was definitely tall. Where he walked, the shadows shifted, observed him for one tense moment, took in his height, his girth and his gait, and then settled back down, pretending they hadn't seen him. The most Tavros had to worry was scraping his horns against the walls in some of the narrower spots.

But that was when he saw her for the first time. She burst out of a door into the alley just ahead of Tavros, and he stopped in his tracks, because she had a highblood officer's arm around her shoulders and she was helping him put one step in front of the other. The highblood was obviously intoxicated, to a degree that would be tempting the culling fork for anyone below a teal. But his uniform—disheveled and stained—was trimmed with cerulean. Tavros recognized him by the shape of his horns. A blowhard casteist with too few connections to avoid getting sent to the boondocks.

The human walked him to the wall just in front of the door and set him against it, then put down a suitcase she had in her other hand. The cerulean sighed, loudly enough to echo through the quiet night, and slid to the ground insensate. Tavros could see that his face was crusted with tears, but serene, and had a bizarre pang of jealousy. Even as he lied there, the human gave him another pap on the face. It seemed off, somehow, though. Not like in the movies, but perfunctory and maybe a bit mocking.

Then she started rifling through his coat pockets and produced a rolled-up stack of alien currency. She counted out bills.

It was at that moment that Tavros seriously wondered if he should say something to the human in the process of mugging his superior officer, but as if sensing his thoughts, she turned to him and smiled.

“Don't worry,” she said, her accent thick and strange, “I have only taken our agreed-upon payment.”

Her words were carefully chosen, perfect textbook grammar but with a strange muffling to the clicks, like she was using her tongue to produce them instead of her voicebox. Tavros had never heard a real human talk before; the ones in the movies were always dubbed over. Maybe this was how they sounded when they talked in Alternian.

She stuffed a wad of bills into her coat pocket and turned a final time towards Tavros, tilting her head in greeting with a sly smile on her face. Then she picked up her case—it was strange, black and oblong, but narrower at one end—and simply walked away, having no qualms about turning her back on him, as if she knew that he was no danger to her.

She was small and soft, but she wasn't afraid, and though he stood there and listened for a long time, the only sound he heard was the click of her heels on the pavement; no muffled thud, no shriek, no scuffle. She walked unimpeded through the back alleys.

Tavros wasn't sure how to handle any of this.

The humans in movies were never dangerous.

*

A few nights later, as Tavros was in the mess hall having lunch (the same bland stuff as always, but with the benefit of only being a _little_ congealed as opposed to a lot), he stirred from his reverie just in time to hear two midbloods gossiping at the table behind him.

“She's there most nights,” one of them said, and there was no reason to believe they were talking about _her—_ that is, the her that Tavros had in mind—but he listened anyway, even if eavesdropping was, strictly speaking, a bit rude.

“I heard Naifir talking about it, but I didn't believe--”

“No, no, it's true! I mean, don't spread it around, but that's where you'll find her, if you want. She plays this human instrument, like a wooden box with strings, and she has a stick she uses on the strings so it makes sounds? I'm not sure what it's called.”

“I think humans have a lot of those,” the other one said. “Does she play it every night?”

“I don't think so? She didn't play when I was there, but I only went the once. Maybe if someone requests...”

“I heard Grigya talking about getting her face papped by the human.”

“Ha! I heard Grigya emptied her savings account to get her face papped by the human.”

“Oh my god.” A scandalized pause. Then, hesitantly, “Do you think...? I have some creds saved up...”

“...Are you serious?”

“What?” Defensive. “I'm not letting that shitblood Grigya be the only one to get some pale action from a human. D'you think I'll get this opportunity ever again?”

“Well, I don't think you shoul-- hey, do you mind?”

Tavros realized belatedly that his head was turned slightly towards the two conversing trolls, which might have gone unnoticed if not for the inconvenient size of his horns.

“No, I don't mind at all,” he replied, feeling a bit peeved by the midblood's tone. “Please, continue.”

The midbloods scoffed at him in disgust—some were like that, in that they acted worse towards lowbloods than those higher on the hemospectrum—and then, figuring they wouldn't do very well against him in a fight, picked up their lunch and moved to another table.

But Tavros still had two good ears and everybody around him had loose lips, so it wasn't long until he found out where the human was spending her nights.

It was at a highblood bar. Not officially speaking, since it was operated by an alien and strictly speaking anybody could walk through the door if they wanted, but he knew that its normal range of customers was teal to blue, or maybe indigo if there was someone from higher up on an inspection, but very rarely green, and anybody lower only if they were brave by way of alcohol or stupidity.

But then, that must have been where she came out of that night he crossed paths with her. If he passed through there again, maybe he'd meet her once more, just to get a better look at her, even if the chance of that happening was fairly thin.

He had no idea why he was obsessing so much over her, anyway. He didn't need conciliating, he didn't think. He was sure he'd know if he did, although his point of reference for that was Vriska, who needed more conciliation than anybody he'd met before or since, so maybe his sense of scale was off in this regard.

Curiosity, he decided. He was just curious.

*

In the end, it wasn't curiosity that made him decide to go look for her.

He just found himself sitting in the same seat as every week when he went out for drinks. He looked around and saw that he was surrounded by the same people he was always surrounded by, the same boring, bored individuals that were neither his quadrants nor his friends, lowbloods sticking together because it was safer than not doing so, telling the same stories every week, harping on the same complaints and, _god_ , Tavros thought. _God, his life was tedious and repetitive._ He wanted to pick up the table and throw it against a wall just to see it smash to splinters, just for a change of pace. They'd all look at him like he was crazy, and he'd laugh in their faces.

So he quietly paid his tab and left, because ennui was a poor excuse for inflicting property damage on an innocent bar owner's furniture.

He didn't even notice that his footsteps took him to that same spot where he saw her the week before until he was already there. He was still in in deep thought when he opened the door and walked in.

The bar was full. He also probably only imagined that everybody stopped what they were doing and turned to look at him. In the dimness, he was just another figure—highblood-huge and anonymous. His jacket was zipped closed and his sign was out of sight.

The bar area was by far the best lighted, so he gave it a wide berth. He slipped into a booth at the back.

There was a subdued sort of excitement throughout the room. Tavros sank to the back of the booth and looked around, and he could definitely discern an air of expectation.

A waiter came to take his order—an alien. Xe had almost as many metal bits as xe had feathers; not just prosthetics, but jewelry along xir limbs and all the way down xir crest. Tavros was so taken aback by xir appearance that he stammered an embarrassing amount while asking for a soda. The waiter made a low churr that sounded like a mean laugh and departed.

Tavros didn't have to wait long for the soda to arrive, and when it did, he hunkered down and settled in for a long wait. He noticed the glances trolls around the room were giving a certain door, and he kept his eyes on it.

Sure enough, the door opened and the human sauntered in. The hum of conversation became hushed as every eye in the room turned to her. She seemed completely indifferent, however, and sat down at the bar. The barkeep wordlessly placed a drink in front of her, something deep red in an elegant glass.

Tavros scooted to the edge of the booth to take a better look at her. A couple of braver trolls left their tables and seated themselves next to the human.

The air was tense. Tavros couldn't hear what the trolls were saying, but the human gave a low laugh. Then she picked up her glass and left. The trolls watched her leave with a mixture of embarrassment and confusion.

She was coming his way, though, and Tavros froze in his seat.

She was coming right towards him. Tavros found himself in the middle of a mild panic attack. Did she remember him?

She looked at him ( _purple eyes, heavy make-up_ , Tavros noticed) and then her gaze slipped right off him and away.

The human passed by him and slipped into the booth next to his.

Tavros slumped into his seat, relieved and disappointed all at once. He took a long swig of his soda. It was cold enough to make his teeth ache.

He felt stupid to a degree he hadn't felt since he stopped FLARPing with Vriska. There was something of her mocking voice in his head now ( _You didn't think she was coming to you, did you Pupa? Hahahaha_ ) and he felt all the worse for the fact that it was right. What did he expect? He wasn't special, this wasn't serendipity. In the movies, the lowblood was never the one who won the quadrant of the love interest. And this wasn't a movie, this was real life, so his expectations should have been even lower.

Now he felt like everybody in the room was laughing at him. They were certainly looking roughly in his direction, but it was probably at her, and not at him.

At least with her in the next booth, he could hear her voice when she shot down the advances of whatever troll was brave enough to approach her. And oh, they definitely approached her.

“Miss Lalonde,” they'd start, or sometimes just “Lalonde” with a grave nod, and one called her “Rose” before backtracking quickly to “Miss Lalonde” again.

“Miss Lalonde,” they'd say, “I heard you were in tonight and I was wondering if...” or sometimes “my matesprit was wondering if” or other times, “my former kismesis and I were wondering if...”

They almost never managed to get a full request out, because she'd stop them.

“I am only here for a drink,” she'd say, “so I cannot fulfill your request. But you've done well without me until now, I think you will all manage without me from now on.”

Some would insist or get belligerent.

“Perhaps I should leave, then,” she'd say, and at that point the troll in question would look around the room at all the hopeful faces looking their way, make some quick calculations in their head, and decide that they wouldn't want to catch the blame for driving her away.

After a while, as word got around the room that the human was not amenable to-- to whatever they were expecting her to be amenable to (Tavros has a sense that this was not how things went on other nights), the steady trickle of trolls dropping in on her table tapered off.

The mood in the room shifted as well. The excitement became replaced by something else. Tavros could feel psychic static in his horns, as the waves of emotional tension broke against the shore of the human's indifference. She didn't seem to notice a thing, continuing to sit there and drink by herself.

What Tavros should have done at that moment was pay his tab and slip out the back door.

What he did instead was turn his head towards the human and whisper, “You should leave.”

There was silence for a while, and then a thoughtful 'hmmm'. Tavros thought that maybe she didn't hear him, or was ignoring her, but then she whispered,

“Yes, I suppose I should.”

She rose from the table and turned towards the bar, probably to pay her tab, but a blueblood planted himself in her path.

Silence fell on the room as everyone turned to openly stare at them.

The human—Miss Lalonde—smiled up at the blueblood. Tavros never thought he'd seen someone make flat teeth look so threatening.

“Please step aside,” she said, her tone all politeness, but the word for 'please' that she used was the one employed when one spoke to their inferior. Not a genuine entreaty, but a courtesy you do someone before you mow them down anyway.

Tavros felt the hairs on the back of his head stand up.

The blueblood looked uncertain for a fleeting second. Probably because he wasn't sure if her use of the word was deliberate or out of unfamiliarity with the language. From the way his face settled into a displeased mien, he probably decided on the former.

He displayed his own teeth, as jagged as a seadweller's but not nearly as thin, and he placed his hand on Miss Lalonde's forearm.

“You should come with me,” he purred, his smile twisting upwards at the corners. “There are all manner of dangerous people around.”

That was the slimiest pale come-on Tavros had ever heard, the kind of thing uttered in dark alleys to cornered lowbloods. He felt his innards wrench in disgust.

Miss Lalonde's smile evaporated, and she looked at the blueblood's hand with a completely unimpressed look on her face.

Then—and Tavros had to guess at what happened because he was momentarily blinded by a flash—the blueblood was sent flying several feet; he crashed into a table, reducing it to kindling. The dismayed patrons sitting at said table belatedly scrambled out of the way, barely managing to salvage a few of their drinks.

“Yes,” Miss Lalonde said, taking one slow, deliberate step after another, closer to the blueblood. There were knitting needles in her hands—or, no, they were actually wands, Tavros realized. They glowed so white that it swung back into black, an effect that made Tavros's brain hurt. “There are dangerous people in this place.”

The blueblood froze as Miss Lalonde loomed over him. She raised her wand.

The psychic tension in the room was so thick that Tavros's skull felt crushed. In the edges of his conscious mind, there were whispers, the kind he hadn't heard since Alternia, and he genuinely thought the Vast Glub was coming for them all on that very night, until he realized that the human was responsible.

He wished she would cut down the blueblood quick and stop drawing it out, stop tormenting him with the voices of horroterrors, and as he looked around the room, he realized that this was what everybody else was thinking too.

Except one person. The blueblood's quadrantmate, perhaps. Maybe a matesprit or a kismesis, but she advanced on Miss Lalonde from behind, a jagged, broken bottle raised in her hand. Miss Lalonde did not notice her.

Tavros made his most questionable decision yet, and jumped out from his seat, body-slamming the attacker. She was half his size and toppled over easily, but she shrieked, high and grating.

The next sequence of events unfolded too fast for Tavros to keep track of it, but from what he would remember later, one of the other patrons in the bar, whether because he was observant or because he recognized Tavros from around the base, turned to him and hissed, “You fucking shitblood, how dare you--”

Then two more jumped at him.

Then there was a lot of light and chaos and screaming and someone—maybe multiple someones—grabbed at his clothes and horns and punched him in the ribs. But in the confusion, he felt hands being ripped off him one by one, and a voice hissing in his ear, “Come with me.”

He felt his hand being gripped hard enough to hurt and then he was dragged out of the melee, stepping over broken glass and squishy body parts and--

The next thing Tavros knew, he was pulled along at a brisk pace, not quite a run, through the back alleys.

Miss Lalonde was the one holding his hand.

*

It was not until he was seated on an uncomfortably small sleeping platform in a tiny guest block that Tavros let out a shuddering sigh and felt safe again.

After intense struggles with a rusted old heating plate in the corner, Miss Lalonde handed him a cup.

“Careful, it's hot,” she said.

The contents of the cup were dark brown and sweet-smelling. Tavros blew at it and the delicate tendrils of steam dispersed.

“It's hot chocolate,” Miss Lalonde answered his unvoiced question. “I usually have mine with rum, but I know not all trolls take to alcohol.”

“No, uh, that would be fine, I guess? I've had alcohol before.”

Strictly speaking, alcohol was fairly new in Alternian society, something taken from humans. Not that other species didn't have their own intoxicants, but alcohol proved especially palatable to trolls.

“Drink it this way,” she said, “and if you don't like it you can try it with rum next.”

She sat down in a chair across from him and took a sip from her own cup.

Tavros tried the drink, careful not to burn himself. It was smooth and had a slight bitterness that underscored the sweetness, and it coated his mouth and digestive tract with warmth as it went down. He liked it a lot, and he felt some of the tension of the night leave him.

“That doesn't usually happen, does it?” he asked after a while. “The, uh, dissatisfied customers?”

“No,” Miss Lalonde replied. “But it also doesn't happen often that a brownblood visits that particular establishment.”

“Oh,” Tavros said, because he wasn't sure how to take her comment. It didn't _sound_ disapproving, but.

But her eyes were purple and Tavros realized that he didn't know a lot about humans in general, much less this one in particular.

“So was it recklessness or bravery that made you come there?” she asked, a light smile on her lips.

“It was curiosity. That is, I won't deny that my actions could be construed as, recklessness, because saying they were brave would be disingenuous on my part, but I didn't think of it in those terms, at the time, I just wanted to, uh...”

“See the human?” Miss Lalonde finished for him, her smile turning sharp.

Tavros looked down on his cup and took a sip.

“That's quite alright,” she continued, “you would not be the first and if my time in Alternian space has taught me anything, you won't be the last.”

“Uh, yes, I suppose you'd get a lot of attention.”

“Oh, yes, I have. I find that it works out in my benefit.”

“I suppose, you must enjoy taking your pay in bar brawls, if you say that.”

She burst into laughter. It sounded strange to Tavros's ears, not at all like a troll laugh. It was breathy, lacking the growling undertones. It, perhaps, made it sound a bit more insincere, but he had to remember she was alien.

“I admit, I should have foreseen it,” she said, grinning. “I spent a lot of time here and I have had many clients, but I suppose my novelty hadn't worn off yet. It hardly matters now, though. I've made enough money to finance the next leg of my journey.”

“Is that why you were, conciliating for creds? If you don't mind me asking, that is?”

“I don't mind one bit.” She shrugged. “That was exactly what I was doing. Sometimes I also play music for money, but that does not pay nearly as well as an hour with an emotionally overwrought highblood, or half an hour knocking together the heads of two trolls who should know better than enter a caliginous relationship together.”

“This can't be the reason you're traveling through Alternian space, though, can it?” Tavros asked. She was being very amenable to answering his questions, and this was probably the one opportunity he'd have to understand her bizarre visit to this far-flung outpost.

“Not at all. I was part of a troupe of musicians,” she said. “We were touring the galaxy, engaging in interspecies cultural exchange. I had a falling out with the director of the troupe, however. She thought we should all submit to her ironfisted regime, whereas I considered that if we were going to be worked within an inch of our lives, we should at least get paid for it. She told me I could leave if I didn't like her terms.”

Tavros raised an eyebrow.

“So was it bravery, or recklessness, that made you leave?” he asked.

“Neither,” she said, shaking her head. “It was pride. I set off without money or a clear idea of how to get home, but I'm halfway there, so I can't be failing too badly.”

“How long have you been traveling?”

“A few perigees now. My frequent stops have made the journey much longer.”

“But you didn't think you had a different choice?”

“Not as such, no.”

Tavros's cup was empty, and she took it from him, placing it on a table.

“When a superior proves himself incompetent,” Tavros said, “he is usually culled and replaced by the next officer in line.”

She gave him an uncertain look.

“That is not how humans do it,” she said, sounding a bit sad.

“But, I saw you at the bar, you were going to cull that blueblood,” Tavros pointed out. “You were ready to cull him.”

“But that is still not how humans do things. Petty incompetence is not a good reason for killing anyone, least of all if they never killed or physically harmed anybody else.”

“Killing and culling are different things.”

“They amount to the same, however.”

“So then, were you not supposed to want to cull the blueblood either? By this logic?”

Miss Lalonde lapsed into silence, staring at some point past Tavros's shoulder. Her fingernail, painted black, tapped against the cup in her hand. Click. Click. Click. As the silence extended, Tavros felt the urge to shift awkwardly rising.

“I'm sorry, have I, uh, said something wrong?” he asked once the silence became too much for him.

“Not at all,” she said, eyes focusing on him again. “Quite the opposite. I am disappointed in myself, because a troll has a better grasp of human morality than I do at times.”

“Uh...”

“The truth is, yes, I did consider killing the director. Not in the fanciful way that most humans do, but with serious intent to do her harm. I could have had a discussion with the other musicians and staged a coup, but that was not my first thought. So, for my own sake, I removed myself from the situation. I fled, like a coward, leaving no word or clue as to my intentions. Because I knew that murdering her would have been only the first in a long line of horrifying acts which I would have rationalized away easier and easier every time. You understand, of course, that I do not confess lightly and that I would never tell these things to another human?”

“Uhhh...”

Unsure what to do, and a bit terrified that she was looking at him like she was expecting an actual response, Tavros did the first thing that crossed through his mind.

He reached out and ran his hand over her cheek.

“Did you just pap my face?” she asked after a short but incredulous silence.

“Yes?” Tavros said, unsure even as his hand was still on her face.

“Are you aware that there are hundreds of trolls on this planet who would pay very steeply for this privilege?”

“I, uh... should I stop?”

“You should at least tell me your name before you continue fondling my cheek.”

“It's Tavros.”

“Well,” she said, placing her hand over his and smiling. “Hello, Tavros. I'm Rose.”

Tavros felt himself blush. “Hello, Rose.”

*

Rose's hands were callused in interesting ways, which she explained was because of the instrument she played. She let Tavros poke at the calluses and then she turned his hands over and made him explain his own.

It was bizarrely intimate. Tavros wasn't sure what to make of it except that it was pale, but it couldn't be because he didn't hire her to do this. Maybe everything they said about humans was true and they really did fall into pale so easily. He tried not to think about it, because the thought that this didn't matter as much to her as it did to him was too unbearable.

He told her about his childhood and she inquired about his feelings towards his lusus (for some reason...?), and then she went on to ask about his friends. He told her about his FLARPing team and his friends, and she seemed to zero in on Vriska, an issue which was still thorny for him after all these sweeps, but Rose didn't make him feel bad about the ugly way in which he cut off their friendship and all in all, even seemed to approve, which not many trolls would have. Vriska was high enough on the spectrum that she was expected to set the terms of their relationship, and he was low enough that he was expected to take it. But Rose took his side, a refreshing change of pace.

She offered only tantalizing little hints of her own life and childhood in return, but she explained human familial structures in a way that was not patronizing, and Tavros's familiarity with mammalian reproduction went a long way towards helping him understand the social implications of what she was telling him. But she was vague about her family, even though it was clear to him that she cared deeply about them. Tavros didn't mind; he wasn't entitled to anything so personal and he wasn't going to make such demands of her.

She showed him her wands, sharp and heavy in her hands, and told him how simple they seemed to make everything.

*

“I could rend the world and remake it how I wished,” she said. “It would be not even a little bit difficult.”

“Maybe that's, the bait?” he said. He felt the whispers again, just out of his conscious mind's reach. He couldn't understand them, but he could guess at the promises they made. “It's how they get their hooks in you. By offering you something you would find irresistible, and then not showing you the price tag until it's too late.”

“Yes, the thought had occurred to me,” Rose said. “But still, so easy.”

“If things were really that easy, for a horroterror, why would they need anything from you?” Tavros asked.

Rose frowned as she looked at the wands. She put them away with a thoughtful look on his face, and though she didn't say another word about them, Tavros thought that maybe she might be giving his words at least some consideration.

*

She played the violin for him, and it was the most beautiful thing Tavros had ever heard. It was alien and weird, discordant in some ways, but Rose was good at guessing what he liked and going with it, or maybe his face was really expressive, he'd been told he had that problem before, but it didn't feel like a problem in those moments.

“The sun's risen,” he noticed in the pause between two melodies, when the light began bothering his eyes.

“Will you be in trouble?”

“No, I can just go back to base in the evening,” he shrugged. It was against the rules, technically speaking, but nobody cared enough to actually enforce them.

“Very well,” she said, and pulled the curtain over the window. The room was half-dark and comfortable again, and she continued her performance.

When Rose paused, they had low conversations, and they confessed silly things to each other. Tavros ended up crying at least twice and Rose dabbed at her eyes in a suspiciously emotional manner at least once, but they ended up laughing dozens of times, once so hard that they clung to each other as tears streamed down their face and then flopped on the sleeping platform together. The springs shrieked in protest at their combined weight.

“I hope we didn't break it,” Tavros whispered, dizzy from laughter.

“It shouldn't matter much,” Rose assured him. “I will be leaving soon.”

“Oh,” he said. Just 'oh', because he felt bereft at the thought and it really wasn't his place to feel that way.

“But we need to keep in touch,” she said.

“I think I'm pale for you,” he blurted out.

He felt silly and embarrassed, like he was seven sweeps old all over again and confessing to Aradia, but this time his affections were even more doomed than back then, because there was even less chance of Rose reciprocating his feelings than there was with Aradia.

“Tavros,” Rose said, turning on her side and pillowing her head on her arm, “you do know that human don't do 'pale' in the same way as trolls do?”

“No, I didn't assume they would,” Tavros said, feeling his bloodpusher shrivel up in disappointment.

“That doesn't make my attachment to you any less real, however,” she continued. “But the emotional content of our relationship would not necessarily follow your cultural expectations.”

Tavros mulled over this for a while.

“You're saying that you feel something just as strongly, but you can't express it in the same way as trolls?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“How would you know? Maybe the way you feel is pale, but you have no point of comparison, so you wouldn't know it.”

“Goodness, we're getting philosophical.”

Tavros sat up and turned to look at her. Curious, Rose sat up next to him.

“I just think, if the, as you call it, emotional content is roughly the same, and you have no way of knowing that it's not the same, just as two troll moirails wouldn't have any way of knowing that it is the same, unless psychic powers were involved, I guess, but even those prove that not everyone's emotional profile is the same, I just think-- I--”

Rose placed her hand over his mouth and papped him. “Shoosh. You win. We're moirails.”

“Good. Well. If you agree.”

After a second's hesitation, he leaned forward and planted a kiss on her forehead.

“It's traditional,” he explained. “When you, uh, that is, when two trolls that pity each other very much enter the pale quadrant together...”

She rose to her feet and kissed him on the forehead as well, cutting off his explanation.

*

In the end, Tavros gave Rose his Trollian handle and Rose gave him her Pesterchum one, and they spent half an hour on her laptop scouring the open net until they found a third-party app that allowed communication between the two programs.

It was evening by then, and Tavros had to leave to report for his duty shift.

He returned that same night, as soon as he was able, and though it took him a few tries until he found the way back to her temporary dwellings, she had a cup of hot chocolate waiting for him.

They didn't talk as much this time, mostly because he succumbed to exhaustion and fell asleep on her sleeping platform, but he also didn't have daymares. He thought that maybe Rose was holding them off, though perhaps he was just projecting his own romantic notions on the situation. He felt her hand on his forehead in his sleep, however, and that made him feel safe.

She had to leave the next night. The block she occupied was expensive, and with her source of income gone, she needed to save all her money for the trip.

When she left, it felt like a part of Tavros left with her, not a piece, but like an elastic tendril connecting him to another soul, currently hurtling through the void in a cheap starhopper headed for another sad, dinky outpost in the middle of nowhere. He felt out of balance for the next few nights, expectant and afraid at the same time.

One night he logged onto Trollian and there she was, online for the first time since she left, and he felt centered again. He felt like himself the way he never did before meeting her, and he finally understood what serendipity meant.


End file.
